Today, OpenAI released a new result. We used PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization), a general reinforcement learning algorithm invented by OpenAI, to train a team of 5 agents to play Dota and beat semi-pros.

This is the game that to me feels closest to the real world and complex decision making (combining strategy, tactics, coordinating, and real-time action) of any game AI had made real progress against so far.

The agents we train consistently outperform two-week old agents with a win rate of 90-95%. We did this without training on human-played games—we did design the reward functions, of course, but the algorithm figured out how to play by training against itself.

This is a big deal because it shows that deep reinforcement learning can solve extremely hard problems whenever you can throw enough computing scale and a really good simulated environment that captures the problem you’re solving. We hope to use this same approach to solve very different problems soon. It's easy to imagine this being applied to environments that look increasingly like the real world.

There are many problems in the world that are far too complex to hand-code solutions for. I expect this to be a large branch of machine learning, and an important step on the road towards general intelligence.

I am pretty sure cryptocurrency is here to stay in some form (at least as a store of value, which is the only use case we have seen work at scale so far). There was possibly a time when governments could have totally stopped it, but it feels like that’s in the rearview mirror.

However, I think it’s very possible that the dominant cryptocurrency hasn’t been created yet (Google was years late to the search engine party, and Facebook came long after most people assumed the social network wars were won). And from the perspective of a nation, there are real problems with current systems, especially around pseudo-anonymity, ability to function as an actual currency, and taxability.

Although I don’t think the US government can stop cryptocurrency, I do think it could create the winner–let’s call it “USDC” for US Digital Currency–and fix some challenges that governments currently face with cryptocurrency.

I think the first superpower government to do something like this will have an enviable position in the future of the world, and some power over a worldwide currency.

The US government could decide to treat USDC as a second legal currency, which would be hugely powerful. (I think the US doing this would be significantly more impactful than the smaller governments thinking about it now.)

Ideally the initial coins would be evenly distributed to US citizens and taxpayers—something like everyone with a social security number gets two coins, one that is immediately sellable and one that you have to keep for 10 years.

USDC could require that certain transaction can only happen with wallets with known owners. It could even build a tax system into the protocol.

A tricky part of this would be how to balance letting the network have control over itself and letting the government have some special degree of input on ‘monetary policy’. It’s certainly ok for the government to have some, but I think the network needs to be mostly in charge (e.g., the government couldn’t be allowed to arbitrarily inflate the currency when it wanted to).

The current practices seem to be for governments to mostly ignore cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency enthusiasts to mostly ignore government, which seems to me to be unsustainable in both directions. But I believe there exists a middle ground where the government can get a lot of what it wants, and cryptocurrency users can get a lot of what they want too.

The government can likely create a lot of de novo wealth for its citizens in the process.

I think I am
at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for
productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place.

Compound
growth gets discussed as a financial concept, but it works in careers as well,
and it is magic. A small productivity
gain, compounded over 50 years, is worth a lot.
So it’s worth figuring out how to optimize productivity. If you get 10%
more done and 1% better every day compared to someone else, the compounded
difference is massive.

WHAT YOU WORK
ON

It doesn’t
matter how fast you move if it’s in a worthless direction. Picking the right thing to work on is the
most important element of productivity and usually almost ignored. So think about it more! Independent thought is hard but it’s
something you can get better at with practice.

The most
impressive people I know have strong beliefs about the world, which is rare in
the general population. If you find yourself always agreeing with whomever
you last spoke with, that’s bad. You
will of course be wrong sometimes, but develop the confidence to stick with
your convictions. It will let you be
courageous when you’re right about something important that most people don’t
see.

I make sure to
leave enough time in my schedule to think about what to work on. The best
ways for me to do this are reading books, hanging out with interesting people,
and spending time in nature.

I’ve learned
that I can’t be very productive working on things I don’t care about or don’t
like. So I just try not to put myself in a position where I have to do
them (by delegating, avoiding, or something else). Stuff that you don’t
like is a painful drag on morale and momentum.

By the way,
here is an important lesson about delegation: remember that everyone else is also
most productive when they’re doing what they like, and do what you’d want other
people to do for you—try to figure out who likes (and is good at) doing what,
and delegate that way.

If you find
yourself not liking what you’re doing for a long period of time, seriously
consider a major job change. Short-term burnout happens, but if it isn’t
resolved with some time off, maybe it’s time to do something you’re more
interested in.

I’ve been very
fortunate to find work I like so much I’d do it for free, which makes it easy
to be really productive.

It’s important
to learn that you can learn anything you want, and that you can get better
quickly. This feels like an unlikely miracle the first few times it
happens, but eventually you learn to trust that you can do it.

Doing great
work usually requires colleagues of some sort. Try to be around smart,
productive, happy, and positive people that don’t belittle your ambitions. I love being around people who push me and
inspire me to be better. To the degree
you able to, avoid the opposite kind of people—the cost of letting them take up
your mental cycles is horrific.

You have to
both pick the right problem and do the work. There aren’t many
shortcuts. If you’re going to do
something really important, you are very likely going to work both smart and
hard. The biggest prizes are heavily competed for. This isn’t true in every field (there are
great mathematicians who never spend that many hours a week working) but it is
in most.

PRIORITIZATION

My system has
three key pillars: “Make sure to get the important shit done”, “Don’t waste
time on stupid shit”, and “make a lot of lists”.

I highly
recommend using lists. I make lists of what I want to accomplish each
year, each month, and each day. Lists are very focusing, and they help me
with multitasking because I don’t have to keep as much in my head. If I’m not in the mood for some particular
task, I can always find something else I’m excited to do.

I prefer lists
written down on paper. It’s easy to add
and remove tasks. I can access them
during meetings without feeling rude. I
re-transcribe lists frequently, which forces me to think about everything on the
list and gives me an opportunity to add and remove items.

I don’t bother
with categorization or trying to size tasks or anything like that (the most I
do is put a star next to really important items).

I try to
prioritize in a way that generates momentum. The more I get done, the
better I feel, and then the more I get done.
I like to start and end each day with something I can really make
progress on.

I am
relentless about getting my most important projects done—I’ve found that if I
really want something to happen and I push hard enough, it usually happens.

I try to be
ruthless about saying no to stuff, and doing non-critical things in the
quickest way possible. I probably take this too far—for example, I am
almost sure I am terse to the point of rudeness when replying to emails.

I generally
try to avoid meetings and conferences as I find the time cost to be huge—I get
the most value out of time in my office. However, it is critical that you
keep enough space in your schedule to allow for chance encounters and exposure
to new people and ideas. Having an open network is valuable; though
probably 90% of the random meetings I take are a waste of time, the other 10%
really make up for it.

I find most meetings are best scheduled for 15-20 minutes, or 2 hours. The default of 1 hour is usually wrong, and leads to a lot of wasted time.

I have
different times of day I try to use for different kinds of work. The
first few hours of the morning are definitely my most productive time of the
day, so I don’t let anyone schedule anything then. I try to do meetings
in the afternoon. I take a break, or
switch tasks, whenever I feel my attention starting to fade.

I don’t think
most people value their time enough—I am surprised by the number of people I
know who make $100 an hour and yet will spend a couple of hours doing something
they don’t want to do to save $20.

Also, don’t
fall into the trap of productivity porn—chasing productivity for its own sake
isn’t helpful. Many people spend too much time thinking about how to perfectly
optimize their system, and not nearly enough asking if they’re working on the
right problems. It doesn’t matter what system you use or if you squeeze
out every second if you’re working on the wrong thing.

The right goal
is to allocate your year optimally, not your day.

PHYSICAL
FACTORS

Very likely
what is optimal for me won’t be optimal for you. You’ll have to
experiment to find out what works best for your body. It’s definitely worth doing—it helps in all
aspects of life, and you’ll feel a lot better and happier overall.

It probably
took a little bit of my time every week for a few years to arrive at what works
best for me, but my sense is if I do a good job at all the below I’m at least
1.5x more productive than if not.

Sleep seems to
be the most important physical factor in productivity for me. Some sort
of sleep tracker to figure out how to sleep best is helpful. I’ve found the only
thing I’m consistent with are in the set-it-and-forget-it category, and I
really like the Emfit QS+Active.

I like a cold,
dark, quiet room, and a great mattress (I resisted spending a bunch of money on
a great mattress for years, which was stupid—it makes a huge difference to my
sleep quality. I love this one). Not eating a lot in the few hours before sleep
helps. Not drinking alcohol helps a lot, though
I’m not willing to do that all the time.

I use a Chili
Pad to be cold while I sleep if I can’t get the room cold enough, which is
great but loud (I set it up to have the cooler unit outside my room).

This is likely
to be controversial, but I take a low dose of sleeping pills (like a third of a
normal dose) or a very low dose of cannabis whenever I can’t sleep. I am
a bad sleeper in general, and a particularly bad sleeper when I travel. It likely has tradeoffs,
but so does not sleeping well. If you
can already sleep well, I wouldn’t recommend this.

I use a full
spectrum LED light most mornings for about 10-15 minutes while I catch up on
email. It’s great—if you try nothing else in here, this is the thing I’d
try. It’s a ridiculous gain for me.
I like this one, and it’s easy to travel with.

Exercise is
probably the second most important physical factor. I tried a number of
different exercise programs for a few months each and the one that seemed best
was lifting heavy weights 3x a week for an hour, and high intensity interval
training occasionally. In addition to productivity gains, this is also
the exercise program that makes me feel the best overall.

The third area
is nutrition. I very rarely eat breakfast, so I get about 15 hours of
fasting most days (except an espresso when I wake up). I know this is contrary
to most advice, and I suspect it’s not optimal for most people, but it
definitely works well for me.

Eating lots of
sugar is the thing that makes me feel the worst and that I try hardest to
avoid. I also try to avoid foods that aggravate my digestion or spike up
inflammation (for example, very spicy foods). I don’t have much willpower when it comes to
sweet things, so I mostly just try to keep junk food out of the house.

I have one big shot of espresso immediately when I wake up and one after lunch. I assume this is
about 200mg total of caffeine per day. I
tried a few other configurations; this was the one that worked by far the best.
I otherwise aggressively avoid stimulants, but I will have more coffee if
I’m super tired and really need to get something done.

I’m
vegetarian and have been since I was a kid, and I supplement methyl B-12, Omega-3, Iron, and Vitamin D-3. I
got to this list with a year or so of quarterly blood tests; it’s worked for me
ever since (I re-test maybe every year and a half or so). There are many
doctors who will happily work with you on a super comprehensive blood test (and
services like WellnessFX). I also go out
of my way to drink a lot of protein shakes, which I hate and I wouldn’t do if I
weren’t vegetarian.

OTHER STUFF

Here’s what I
like in a workspace: natural light, quiet, knowing that I won’t be interrupted
if I don’t want to be, long blocks of time, and being comfortable and relaxed
(I’ve got a beautiful desk with a couple of 4k monitors on it in my office, but
I spend almost all my time on my couch with my laptop).

I wrote custom
software for the annoying things I have to do frequently, which is great.
I also made an effort to learn to type really fast and the keyboard
shortcuts that help with my workflow.

Like most
people, I sometimes go through periods of a week or two where I just have no
motivation to do anything (I suspect it may have something to do with
nutrition). This sucks and always seems to happen at inconvenient
times. I have not figured out what to do
about it besides wait for the fog to lift, and to trust that eventually it
always does. And I generally try to
avoid people and situations that put me in bad moods, which is good advice
whether you care about productivity or not.

In general, I
think it’s good to overcommit a little bit. I find that I generally get
done what I take on, and if I have a little bit too much to do it makes me more
efficient at everything, which is a way to train to avoid distractions (a great
habit to build!). However, overcommitting a lot is disastrous.

Don’t neglect
your family and friends for the sake of productivity—that’s a very stupid
tradeoff (and very likely a net productivity loss, because you’ll be less
happy). Don’t neglect doing things you love or that clear your head
either.

Finally, to
repeat one more time: productivity in the wrong direction isn’t worth anything
at all. Think more about what to work on.

I made a point in this post inelegantly in a way that was
easy to misunderstand, so I’d like to clarify it.

I didn’t mean that we need to tolerate brilliant homophobic
jerks in the lab so that we can have scientific progress.
Although there are famous counterexamples, most of the best scientists
I’ve met are unusually nice, open-minded people. Generally I expect that labs that don’t
tolerate jerks will produce more impressive results than the ones that do, and choosing not to employ jerks is a good idea—jerks usually
reduce the net output of organizations.

What I meant is simply that we need, as a society, to
tolerate controversial ideas. The
biggest new scientific ideas, and the most important changes to society, both start
as extremely unpopular ideas.

It was literally heretical, not so long ago, to say that it
was ok to be gay—the Bible has a different viewpoint. In a society where we don’t allow challenges
to the orthodoxy, gay rights would not have happened.

We need to allow free speech because sometimes society is
wrong—we needed people to be able to say “gay people are ok” at a time when
“gay people are evil” was the consensus opinion.

It’s probably impossible to design a simple set of rules
that will always allow the right speech and not the wrong speech (although I am
sure that in this particular case, it is wrong that gay people in some places
still fear for their safety.)

So we agree as a society that people are allowed to say
controversial things, and that free speech goes both ways. Much of the time people use that privilege to
be jerks, and we can, should, and do point out why their bigotry is bad. Sometimes they use it to say that people
deserve more rights, or that the solar system works in a different way from what the church says—and sometimes we collectively listen.

Over time, this system produces a more and more just world, which says something really good about people as a whole.

I wish we could figure out a way to just never allow hate,
discrimination, and bigotry and always allow debate on controversial but
important ideas. If that were possible,
I’d support it. The distinction is
usually clear, but the exceptions are sometimes critically important. Figuring out exactly where to draw the line is really hard.

Generations before us believed a lot of things we now
believe (correctly, in my opinion) to be unethical or wrong. Future generations will think a lot of things
we believe today are unethical or wrong.

For example, today it is pretty unpopular to say “anyone who
eats meat is unethical”. But this is
easily a stance I could imagine being commonplace in 50 years, because of
evolving views on animal rights, impact on the planet, and availability of
lab-grown replacements. Perhaps even the
arrival of AI makes us think differently about being ok eating other beings
just because they’re much less smart/emotionally sophisticated than we are.

The last time I tried to discuss this with
someone, he said something like: “Banning eating meat would be infringing on my
rights, this is not up for discussion.”

I expect the fact that we let people live in
poverty is also something that future generations will consider an absolute moral failing. I could go on with a long
list of other ideas, and I’m sure I can’t even think of some of the most
important ones.

The point I most wanted to make is that is that it’s
dangerous to just ban discussion of topics we find offensive, like what
happened yesterday.

Earlier
this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I
realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than
in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China,
after all—just more comfortable than at home.

That showed me just how bad things have become, and how much things
have changed since I first got started here in 2005.

It
seems easier to accidentally speak heresies in San Francisco every year. Debating a controversial idea, even if you
95% agree with the consensus side, seems ill-advised.

This will be very bad for startups in the Bay Area.

Restricting
speech leads to restricting ideas and therefore restricted innovation—the most
successful societies have generally been the most open ones. Usually mainstream ideas are right and
heterodox ideas are wrong, but the true and unpopular ideas are what drive the
world forward. Also, smart people tend
to have an allergic reaction to the restriction of ideas, and I’m now seeing
many of the smartest people I know move elsewhere.

It
is bad for all of us when people can’t say that the world is a sphere, that
evolution is real, or that the sun is at the center of the solar system.

More
recently, I’ve seen credible people working on ideas like pharmaceuticals for
intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension
leave San Francisco because they found the reaction to their work to be so
toxic. “If people live a lot longer it
will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be
really unethical” was a memorable quote I heard this year.

To
get the really good ideas, we need to tolerate really bad and wacky ideas too.
In addition to the work Newton is best known for, he also studied alchemy
(the British authorities banned work on this because they feared the
devaluation of gold) and considered himself to be someone specially chosen by
the almighty for the task of decoding Biblical scripture.

You
can’t tell which seemingly wacky ideas are going to turn out to be right, and
nearly all ideas that turn out to be great breakthroughs start out sounding
like terrible ideas. So if you want a culture that innovates, you can’t
have a culture where you allow the concept of heresy—if you allow the concept
at all, it tends to spread. When we move
from strenuous debate about ideas to casting the people behind the ideas as
heretics, we gradually stop debate on all controversial ideas.

This
is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging
things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about
physics. [1] Of course we can and should say that ideas are mistaken, but we
can’t just call the person a heretic. We
need to debate the actual idea.

Political
correctness often comes from a good place—I think we should all be willing to
make accommodations to treat others well. But too often it ends up being
used as a club for something orthogonal to protecting actual victims. The best ideas are barely possible to express
at all, and if you’re constantly thinking about how everything you say might be
misinterpreted, you won’t let the best ideas get past the fragment stage.

I
don’t know who Satoshi is, but I’m skeptical that he, she, or they would have
been able to come up with the idea for bitcoin immersed in the current culture of
San Francisco—it would have seemed too crazy and too dangerous, with too many
ways to go wrong. If SpaceX started in San Francisco in 2017, I assume
they would have been attacked for focusing on problems of the 1%, or for doing
something the government had already decided was too hard. I can picture
Galileo looking up at the sky and whispering “E pur si muove” here today.

[1]
I am less worried that letting some people on the internet say things like “gay
people are evil” is going to convince reasonable people that such a
statement is true than I fear losing the opposite—we needed people to be free to say "gay people are ok" to make the progress we've made, even though it was not a generally acceptable thought several decades ago.

In
fact, the only ideas I’m afraid of letting people say are the ones that I think
may be true and that I don’t like. But I accept that censorship is not
going to make the world be the way I wish it were.

A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced species). Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075.

People used to call this the singularity; now it feels uncomfortable and real enough that many seem to avoid naming it at all.

Perhaps another reason people stopped using the word “singularity” is that it implies a single moment in time, and it now looks like the merge is going to be a gradual process. And gradual processes are hard to notice.

I believe the merge has already started, and we are a few years in. Our phones control us and tell us what to do when; social media feeds determine how we feel; search engines decide what we think.

The algorithms that make all this happen are no longer understood by any one person. They optimize for what their creators tell them to optimize for, but in ways that no human could figure out — they are what today seems like sophisticated AI, and tomorrow will seem like child’s play. And they’re extremely effective — at least speaking for myself, I have a very hard time resisting what the algorithms want me to do. Until I made a real effort to combat it, I found myself getting extremely addicted to the internet. [1]

We are already in the phase of co-evolution — the AIs affect, effect, and infect us, and then we improve the AI. We build more computing power and run the AI on it, and it figures out how to build even better chips.

This probably cannot be stopped. As we have learned, scientific advancement eventually happens if the laws of physics do not prevent it.

More important than that, unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen, genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen. It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves.

Our self-worth is so based on our intelligence that we believe it must be singular and not slightly higher than all the other animals on a continuum. Perhaps the AI will feel the same way and note that differences between us and bonobos are barely worth discussing.

The merge can take a lot of forms: We could plug electrodes into our brains, or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot. But I think a merge is probably our best-case scenario. If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it—in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond—they are going to have conflict. We should all want one team where all members care about the well-being of everyone else.

Although the merge has already begun, it’s going to get a lot weirder. We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.

It’s probably going to happen sooner than most people think. Hardware is improving at an exponential rate—the most surprising thing I’ve learned working on OpenAI is just how correlated increasing computing power and AI breakthroughs are—and the number of smart people working on AI is increasing exponentially as well. Double exponential functions get away from you fast.

It would be good for the entire world to start taking this a lot more seriously now. Worldwide coordination doesn’t happen quickly, and we need it for this.

[1] I believe attention hacking is going to be the sugar epidemic of this generation. I can feel the changes in my own life — I can still wistfully remember when I had an attention span. My friends’ young children don’t even know that’s something they should miss. I am angry and unhappy more often, but I channel it into productive change less often, instead chasing the dual dopamine hits of likes and outrage.

(Cross-posted from https://medium.com/wordsthatmatter/merge-now-430c6d89d1fe to here for consistency; thanks to Medium for inviting me to write this!)

I think that every adult US citizen should get an annual share of the US GDP.

I believe that owning something like a share in America would align all of us in making the country as successful as possible—the better the country does, the better everyone does—and give more people a fair shot at achieving the life they want. And we all work together to create the system that generates so much prosperity.

I believe that a new social contract like what I’m suggesting here—where we agree to a floor and no ceiling—would lead to a huge increase in US prosperity and keep us in the global lead. Countries that concentrate wealth in a small number of families do worse over the long term—if we don’t take a radical step toward a fair, inclusive system, we will not be the leading country in the world for much longer. This would harm all Americans more than most realize.

There are historical examples of countries giving out land to citizens (such as the Homestead Acts in the US) as a way to distribute the resources people needed to succeed. Today, the fundamental input to wealth generation isn’t farmland, but money and ideas—you really do need money to make money.

American Equity would also cushion the transition from the jobs of today to the jobs of tomorrow. Automation holds the promise of creating more abundance than we ever dreamed possible, but it’s going to significantly change how we think about work. If everyone benefits more directly from economic growth, then it will be easier to move faster toward this better world.

The default case for automation is to concentrate wealth (and therefore power) in a tiny number of hands. America has repeatedly found ways to challenge this sort of concentration, and we need to do so again.

The joint-stock company was one of the most important inventions in human history. It allowed us to align a lot of people in pursuit of a common goal and accomplish things no individual could. Obviously, the US is not a company, but I think a similar model can work for the US as well as it does for companies.

A proposal like this obviously requires a lot of new funding [1] to do at large scale, but I think we could start very small—a few hundred dollars per citizen per year—and ramp it up to a long-term target of 10-20% of GDP per year when the GDP per capita doubles.

I have no delusions about the challenges of such a program. There would be difficult consequences for things like immigration policy that will need a lot of discussion. We’d also need to figure out rules about transferability and borrowing against this equity. And we’d need to set it up in a way that does not exacerbate short-term thinking or favor unsustainable growth.

However, as the economy grows, we could imagine a world in which every American would have their basic needs guaranteed. Absolute poverty would be eliminated, and we would no longer motivate people through the fear of not being able to eat. In addition to being the obviously right thing to do, eliminating poverty will increase productivity.

American Equity would create a society that I believe would work much better than what we have today. It would free Americans to work on what they really care about, improve social cohesion, and incentivize everyone to think about ways to grow the whole pie.

[1] It’s time to update our tax system for the way wealth works in the modern world—for example, taxing capital and labor at the same rates. And we should consider eventually replacing some of our current aid programs, which distort incentives and are needlessly complicated and inefficient, with something like this.

Of course this won’t solve all our problems—we still need serious reform in areas such as housing, education, and healthcare. Without policies that address the cost of living crisis, any sort of redistribution will be far less effective than it otherwise could be.

I would like to find and support a slate of candidates for the 2018 California elections, and also to find someone to run a ballot initiative focused on affordable housing in the state. A team of aligned people has a chance to make a real change.

I believe in creating prosperity through technology, economic fairness, and maintaining personal liberty.

We are in the middle of a massive technological shift—the automation revolution will be as big as the agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution. We need to figure out a new social contract, and to ensure that everyone benefits from the coming changes.

Today, we have massive wealth inequality, little economic growth, a system that works for people born lucky, and a cost of living that is spiraling out of control. What we've been trying for the past few decades hasn't been working—I think it's time to consider some new ideas.

More information about the principles and policies I believe in is at the link below.

If you want to get funded by YC as a founder in the future, but you don't have a startup that's ready for that yet, joining the YC software team is a great hack to get there.

The YC software team is a small group of hackers in SF that write the software that makes all the parts of YC work.

As a member of the software team, you'll get full access to the YC program, just like founders do. You'll learn the ins and outs of how YC works, and you'll get to follow and learn from hundreds of companies. You'll meet the best people in the startup world and get exposed to the best startup ideas.

Software is how we can scale YC, and the limits of that are probably further out than most people think.

I'm a strong believer in the importance of the internet in helping people to share knowledge and learn from each other. So I’m delighted to share, on behalf of YC Continuity, that we’re investing alongside Collaborative Fund in Quora.

Quora is doing extremely well. They now have more than 190 million monthly unique visitors, almost doubling from a year ago. The combination of their ever-improving machine learning and the increasing amount of knowledge shared means the product gets better as it gets bigger. The content I see from Quora constantly gets more personalized for me.

I also believe they have some of the highest-quality user-generated content on the internet, and a real chance at being one of the few places that contain all human knowledge. The engineering challenges between here and there are great, but if there’s a team and product to bet on, this is one we're backing with confidence.

Adam is one of the few names that people consistently mention when discussing the smartest CEOs in Silicon Valley. And he has a very long-term focus, which has become a rare commodity in tech companies these days.

My relationship with Quora goes back to May 2014 when the company participated in YC. Funding an already successful company was an unusual experiment for us. At that point we didn't have any specific thoughts on how YC might invest in graduates from our program and help them scale. In a way, Quora was the inspiration for deciding we needed to figure out how to do that, and we launched YC Continuity in October 2015.

As an early admirer of Quora and returning investor, I’m thrilled to see the progress they've made and excited to be part of what they do next.